Patton Oswalt Discusses Doing Comedy After His Wife’s Death: ‘If You Can Mock It, You Can Manage It’

If it seems like Patton Oswalt has been discussing the passing of his wife Michelle McNamara a lot lately, that's because he has. As the comedian explained on Late Show last night, the options for dealing with grief seem to be talk about it openly with the hope of healing or let it grind you down into an "avatar of loss." Fortunately for Oswalt, and for anyone else dealing with death, he has chosen the former. "If you don't talk about it, then grief really gets to set up and fortify its positions inside of you and begin to immobilize you," he told Stephen Colbert last night while discussing his decision to talk about McNamara's death in his stand-up. "The more you talk, the more you expose it to the air and to the light, then grief doesn't get a chance to organize itself and you can maybe move on a little easier." Because it's hard to make people laugh from the fetal position.

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